A Nova Scotia justice of the peace says he urged police to warn his old friend 75-year-old Fred Weeks he could be in danger after marrying the woman known as Internet Black Widow, the CBC’s the fifth estate reports.

However, George Megeney said police said their hands were tied because the woman, then known as Melissa Russell, had served her time for killing a previous husband and defrauding a boyfriend she met online.

“I wanted Fred to know the situation that he might be in. You know, he could be in danger,” Megeney said in an exclusive interview with CBC-TV’s the fifth estate.

As it turns out only four days later, after a short honeymoon in Newfoundland, Weeks was rushed to hospital from a bed and breakfast in Sydney, N.S., where he and his new bride had spent the night. Two days after that, police charged Melissa Weeks with attempting to murder her husband and with “administering a noxious thing.”

Weeks was sentenced in 2005 to five years in prison on seven counts of theft from Florida man she met online, Alexander Strategos. Investigators said she stole about $20,000 (U.S.).

In 2001, Weeks, then known as Melissa Stewart, was sentenced to six years for the 1991 manslaughter in the death of her second husband, Gordon Stewart, on a deserted road near Halifax where he was run over twice with her car. She told police her husband had raped her.

In 2000, after just serving two years of her sentence, she travelled to Florida where she met and married Robert Friedrich, who died soon afterward of a cardiac arrest in 2002. No charged were laid but Friedrich family point the finger at her, CBC reports.

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